outlaws in transit
by ember53608
Summary: the avatar did not wake to save the world from sozin's comet, and many still wonder whether he will appear at all. not left with much choice, katara and her friends travel throughout the fire nation as outlaws attempting to liberate the persecuted, while zuko and his partners follow closely behind. [canon divergence.]
1. Chapter 1

If I told you that the main reason I wrote this fic was for the purpose of making Zutara happen, would you believe me? Because that's it. That's literally it. Although I do suppose I enjoy writing about the whole cast in general.

Updates will be sporadic, but I'll try not to totally disappear off the face of the earth. And as always, read and review, please!

* * *

Katara's mood is - incendiary. Hair pulled into a braid that trails down her back, her mother's necklace perfectly visible against the brown of her neck, she raises herself to full height at the head of the caravan, marching onward with steaming purpose. Her eyes are narrowed to little more than slivers of a blue moon, and she approaches the security checkpoint giving the impression that she is two feet taller than every Fire Nation guard stationed there, though she's only fifteen and still hasn't hit her growth spurt.

"Papers?" asks a masked guard no older than twenty, clear cut skin evidence of his not yet having seen serious battle. Katara slips her fingers under her shirt, earning her a puzzled and perhaps turned-on stare. She ignores it, rummaging for the papers tucked into the top of her undershirt that crinkle against her chest. With a deft hand, she pulls them out and presents them to the guard, who takes one more second to eye her with a cross between interest and suspicion.

He looks through the papers, chipped at the corners, and scrunches an eye, gesturing for a second guard - female - to join him. This guard, black hair cropped close to her skull, looks at Katara with a wary eye before turning her head to peer over the first's shoulder. Katara rolls her eyes and crosses her arms, waiting somewhat impatiently for the two to realize that what she's handed them aren't real travel papers at all. Her hand lingers at her pouch, fingers already coaching the precious arctic water to its opening.

The female raises her head slowly, allowing a scar that runs from her eyebrow to her mouth to come into view. Katara gazes on, interest slightly piqued, as the guard narrows her eyes and breathes evenly at her, "Who _are _you?"

Katara frowns, half disappointed, half grateful that the guard doesn't recognize her from old wanted posters. She tenses the muscles that run from her fingers to her shoulders. "Outlaws," she replies. Grinning wickedly, she brings an arc of water out from her pouch and shoots it at the pair, letting the pull of her fingers coax the liquid into ice that crawls around their figures as she yells, "Outlaws in transit!"

The first guard - the rookie - stretches his eyes wide in disbelief as his partner, a look of disgust twisting the scar along one side of her face into the shape of a sickle, retaliates with a calculated flash of fire that erupts from her fingertips. She flips her legs into the air and performs an aerobic maneuver Katara is sure every Fire Nation student is taught the moment they're deemed of age to battle. She ducks the fluorescent attacks, weaving in and out of the flames with trained movements, eyes always poised on the angle of the guard's fingers.

Sokka pokes out his head from the side of their shabby looking caravan and throws a boomerang, successfully knocking the rookie unconscious, though Katara is sure he never would've been any trouble at all. Annoyed with her brother's interference, she shouts over the din, "I can handle it!" He gives her a look, but she returns it ten times stronger, and he shrugs, pulling back to talk strategy with Suki and Toph.

Minutes later, Katara jumps through the window and into the caravan, landing comfortably on her feet. A stray bang hangs over her brow, and she tucks it back into her braid before sitting down, cross-legged. Toph, hair more unruffled than usual, leans her head on a propped hand and says pointedly, "They'll be looking for us now."

Katara frowns and pulls the muscles of her face taut, appearing insulted. With a huff and nonchalant turn of her head, she replies, "That's the point. Now let's move."

Toph, whatever she thinks of the comment, shows no evident reaction, instead making circular motions with her arms, bending the stone wheels beneath them to where the caravan can begin to move at a steady pace. Suki, leaning a little into Sokka's shoulder, but not enough to make him feel totally uncomfortable, asks, "So, what's the plan?"

Katara purses her lips. "The usual. Raid the rich, provide for the poor. There isn't much else we can do until they come after us."

Suki raises an eyebrow, a cornucopia of memories pouring out into her brain within the breadth of the moment. "I thought," - she makes a purposeless gesture with her hands - "y'know, what with the anniversary of _that _and all, that we'd - I don't know, _do _something?"

As soon as she breathes the words, she knows she's made a mistake. Sokka pulls away from her, isolating his skin and toying with the blue and brown boomerang in his hand, trying to look uninterested in the conversation. Katara touches a finger to her necklace and looks away, clearly unsettled but trying not to be, lips trembling as she forces them into a thin line. Toph, as before, acts as if nothing out of the ordinary was said, which oddly makes Suki feel worse than if she'd actually reacted.

"We're not losing anyone else," Katara says finally. She passes her eyes over each of them, gaze molded into something hard by nearly two years of all out war. The moonlit flames that cradle her body are evident; they watch, enraptured, as her anger falls off of her in waves. "Not until he appears."

She gives no clarification as to who "he" is. But they all know it. His title, unspoken, hangs in the air like forthcoming rain. Suki looks out the window and at the wind that helps pull them along. She wonders where he's sleeping.

The Avatar.

{...}

"You seem restless."

Zuko turns his head. Azula stares back at him, smiling pensively, as if in the depths of her mind she's trying to organize her brother into the puzzle pieces he's made of. The black haired prince presses a hand to his forehead, rubbing his temple with his thumb and two fingers. His hair is stretched back into a terse ponytail that reeks of piled on burdens and unwanted but certainly warranted stress. "Outlaws," he murmurs.

"Oh, you mean the attack on the security checkpoint." She flicks her hand in disinterest, perching herself on the ottoman beside him. Her eyes graze his face, and she smiles deviously under the shadow of her bangs. He's learned not to flinch in her presence, but the fact that she feigns taking the news lightly does nothing short of terrify him.

"I thought they were gone," Zuko says, anxiety etched into his voice.

"Well, 'thought' is a very ambiguous word, don't you think, Brother?" Azula continues to smile, sending her flashing teeth his way. She waits complacently for his response, thoroughly enjoying the display of internal conflict playing out on his face. With each conversation they have, she's comes to realize, he breaks a little more, like a teapot in the process of being split in half.

"But who _doesn't _disappear after something like that? Who's stupid enough to want to fight after the world's been scorched in fire?"

Azula picks at a fingernail and replies, coolly, "Pests. And besides, Daddy didn't scorch the _entire _world. Just a third of it."

Zuko looks at his sister in bewilderment, wondering where her composure stems from. His gaze falters to the imprints left by chains on each of her wrists. The water tribe girl in the group had managed, the previous year, to shackle his sister to a sewer grating for a few minutes before she ripped free, breathing blue fire. Zuko, though he hadn't been there at the time, had been impressed when Azula retold the story later, spitting the words out of her mouth like some distasteful dinner course.

"What are you saying?" he asks evenly, paying close attention to the way her lips curl. She drops her hand to the fabric of the ottoman beneath her, splaying out her fingers. Pressing them into the embroidery, she replies, "I'm saying there's still opportunity."

Azula stands up, back facing her brother. "The day of Sozin's Comet may have passed, but the world is still without an Avatar - or so you claim - but that's not the point." She waves her hand dismissively, about to walk away, when her hair whirls and her feet pivot. She turns to face him, a prescient grin stretched across her face. Zuko swallows, Adam's apple bobbing nervously in his throat as he waits for her next attack. There is always one at the end of their conversations. He's learned to know that, too.

"Unless you think they may try to resurface him." Her head cocks to one side, half suggesting that she's considering her own proposition, half suggesting that she expects Zuko to reply to it. Zuko sucks in his breath. His exile had ended because of their victory the previous year. It had been rendered "irrelevant". Iroh had disappeared.

"I'm going after them," he says instead, and Azula lets her eyes slightly dilate as he stands to face her, a mere two inches taller. She looks at him decidedly, arms crossed over her chest. "I don't care what it is, but I'm going to put a stop to it." He pushes past her, the click of his boots echoing against the bedroom's wooden floors. Azula smiles, then turns to follow him.

"Whatever suits you, Zuzu," she says, catching up to him, hands held behind her back. He attempts to walk with lengthier strides, with a quicker step, but she matches him for every footfall, absolutely refusing to let him inch farther ahead. Annoyed, he clenches and unclenches his fists. "Just know that I'm on your side."

"Yeah, right." He says it with breaths in between the words, a subtle difference that changes the aim of them from being sarcastic to being nonchalantly trusting. Azula dips her head in acknowledgement, though the gesture is barely noticable. They walk a while past the intimidating pillars of the main palace, gazes grazing the paintings of previous Fire Lords that hang on either wall. Zuko's eye lingers particularly on a portrait of Sozin and the previous Avatar, his grandfather, Roku. Iroh's story echoes in his ears.

"After you," says Azula all of a sudden, and he halts, boots scuffing against each other. The doors to their father's chamber are towering and looming. Zuko feels the heat of the flames from inside filter past the threshold and warm his feet. He formulates a quick summary of his request to tail the outlaws in his head, then wraps his fingers around one, thick, golden doorlatch. Pulling it back, he half-bows, eyeing his sister with a calculated look.

"No, after you."

{...}

"I miss Dad."

Sokka looks up from the pear he's peeling with his dagger to where Katara stands, leaning against the door to their room's veranda. She folds her arms across her body in a defensive gesture, pulling her sleeves down as far as they're willing to go. The nighttime breeze tugs at his ponytail, but he isn't so much bothered by the shivers it brings as he is by its low, whistling moan. "That makes two of us," he says simply, focusing on the fruit's skin.

She moves, her footfalls making the floorboards creak as she comes over to sit next to him. The anger in her face, he realizes, has long since washed away, replaced with an emptiness and longing he isn't sure he knows how to fill. The moments between them have been fewer and weaker since their father's absence became permanent, and Sokka finds that each day his sister manages to distance herself a little more from him and the rest of their group, not to mention the world.

"Suki was right, you know." She buries her head in between her knees, peering out from them at a crescent moon that hangs low in the sky. "The anniversary's today. We should have done something. Anything."

Sokka rolls this around in his head for a moment before replying, "But you were right, too." The pear in his hand lays sliced into eight parts, four of which he offers to her. She takes them one at a time, slowly squashing each into the pit of her right cheek. "We can't afford to lose anyone else before we have that kind of manpower. The Avatar's, I mean."

"And how long before we _do_ find him?" Katara lifs her head to pierce him with a sad stare. Her braid is coming undone, and her bangs whip past her face like ocean waves, succumbing to the moderate force of the breeze. Her entire countenance is like the ocean, really. Engulfing and endless and so ebullient that he doesn't think he can swim in it without drowning first. "I don't know," he murmurs truthfully, unable to meet her eyes.

"Maybe we should just wait for him to come to us."

Katara's eyes go wide. The anger from earlier that day comes rushing back just as quickly as it faded, and she starts from her place on the floor, fingers curling into her palm, nails biting into her skin. Sokka doesn't turn to look at her, gaze lingering on the pear peel hanging over one side of his hand. His legs fall over the side of the veranda, dangling precariously in the dark summer night.

"Sokka, what do you think we've been doing for the past two years?!" She violently throws out her hand, gesturing at an empty space that he imagines constitutes every one of their failures. He imagines each of them, the memories flickering in his mind like a wavering candle. Kyoshi Island. The Seige of the North. The Spirit Library. Ba Sing Se. Countless others.

"Waiting, and searching, and _waiting._ I'm tired of it, Sokka. I'm tired of trying to think that we can make a difference when we obviously aren't!" Though he doesn't see it, Katara's eyes thin into something like diamond shards. She takes advantage of his gaze not being on her, bringing up the gall to say what she's sure he'll make her pay for. "First Yue, then Dad. What are you going to do when Suki goes, too?"

His hand is curled into the fabric of her neckline before she can make a move. The pear peel fallen onto the floor, he now holds his club in hand, fingers clamped tightly about its handle. Katara stares unwaveringly into his face, into the anger he usually takes so much care to hide and cover with indifference and laughter. The little patch of hair Azula happened to sear off from his left eyebrow the previous year still hasn't grown back, leaving a permanent space of skin where it shouldn't be.

It makes him look old. Battle worn.

"I am _not _talking about this anymore." Sokka lets go of her collar and stalks into the room behind her, leaving her out alone on the veranda, with the exception of the pear peel and late night summer breeze. Bangs whispering past her vision, she angrily undoes the entire braid, letting her tresses fall down her back. Their first raid since a week commences tomorrow, on the province's resident magistrate, but Katara starts to think that neither she nor her brother has the mindset for it.

From the shadows, Suki murmurs, "Did you mean that?"

Katara whips around, finding the Kyoshi warrior nestled into the left doorjamb. In the light of the moon, she looks unfazed, picking idly at a fingernail. But Katara knows she's hit a nerve. She brings a hand to her forehead and closes her eyes, thinking about what to say. No, she didn't mean that. Not at all, even if the statement was somewhat plausible.

They are all vulnerable here. Not equally - in fact, of the four of them, Toph is probably the least vulnerable - but still. Now that she thinks about it, Katara wonders why she didn't suggest herself. It wouldn't have warranted any different reaction from Sokka, but at least the words wouldn't hurt her as much as they obviously hurt Suki now. She sighs, forcing herself to look the brown haired girl in the eye.

"I didn't, and I'm sorry."

Suki's lips curl into a sad smile. Letting her hand fall to her side, she steps away from the doorjamb and turns to go back into the room, where Toph already lays asleep, sprawled messily across a futon Sokka had the care to set out for her when they first entered. Holding the door open, she says, and as kindly as Katara seems she can muster, "It's late. You should get some rest. We have a lot to do tomorrow."

Katara nods stiffly, a motion that conveys she'll stay out a little longer. Once the door closes, she hears whispers past the woodwork. They aren't clear, but she catches her name once or twice. Sifting her fingers through her hair, she turns back to the edge of the veranda, the side that leans out and over the rest of the town and its small residential buildings. The breeze is cool on her feet, and she rests her head against one of the posts, crossing her arms and closing her eyes.

It's how she falls asleep.


	2. Chapter 2

Given that I'm on spring break, I was able to churn this out and have it beta'd pretty quick (the first chapter I'd posted to Tumblr quite a while ago, hence the quick update). In the future, though, I can't really predict how fast I'll update, especially with AP tests coming up. I'll do my best to keep up with it, though!

**For the time being, point-of-view will go back and forth between Zuko and Katara's respective parties. As the story expands, however, that'll change (hint, hint).

As always, read and review, please!

* * *

Zuko finds that he has no reason to object when Azula asks if Ty Lee and Mai can tag along on his mission in her place. He likes their company in general, and while it's true that the girls do tend to tell her everything, he figures that he has nothing to fear. The Avatar hasn't been seen for over a hundred years now, and-by Azula's taunting reasoning-if he didn't appear at the time of Sozin's Comet, then he won't reappear now.

"You're traveling by foot?" Azula asks the morning of their leave, leaning casually against a vertical beam. He pulls the hood of his cloak over his head and holds his sword in its sheath in one hand, the other wrapped around the string of a necessities pack. The girls aren't late, but Zuko is early, unable to sleep since before the sun rose past the horizon. He itches at his face, washed clean but still stuck with the airs of lost hours. Azula smiles at him, awaiting an answer.

"Yeah," he says. "It's not a long trek. We can probably make it by nightfall. Besides, I don't want to draw any attention." The hood already being a testament to this fact, his sister doesn't say anything more, instead basking enjoyably in the light of the sun. Her usual proper attire has left her, and she stands across from him in an oversized night robe that brushes the straw from the stables under her feet.

"Did I hear someone say that we're walking?" Zuko turns around to meet Mai's horizontal and piercing gaze. She looks at him accusingly, arms folded disapprovingly over her chest. Though it's common knowledge that she's had a crush on the crown prince since they were all practically five years old, the fact, she feels, doesn't justify any mistreatment from him, including being made to walk on foot. Zuko flinches a little under her stare, and she almost smiles.

"Oh, c'mon, Mai! It'll be fun!" Ty Lee pats her heartily on the back and wiggles her bare toes at Zuko to show that she's already prepared. He smiles back, grateful all of a sudden that they agreed to accompany him. He hadn't realized until he woke up that if they weren't to come, he'd be all on his own.

He had assumed-maybe carelessly, maybe out of some place in his heart-that Iroh would always be there.

"Zuko?" Ty Lee looks at him with worry pinned to the color of her eyes, and she rests a hand on his shoulder. He starts, hood falling off of his head and revealing the ruffled, unbrushed hair of a sleepless night. Azula's raises an eyebrow and stretches her lips, but continues to say nothing otherwise. "Let's move out," he says gruffly, giving her a short nod before turning to his traveling partners.

Mai mutters something under her breath, but her feet follow Zuko's when he passes them, and the group starts their march to the outlaw stricken city of Shoshana, each always holding a hand ready at their choice of weapon: sword, kunai, intuition.

The trek is without words for the most part. While Ty Lee is fond of conversation, she focuses most of her attention on the nature they blur by, goggling her eyes at plants and animals she claims she's never seen, sometimes while walking on her hands. Mai picks her nails with her kunai, or rolls her eyes at Ty Lee, or tries unfruitfully to make normal-sounding small talk with Zuko. Her dialogue still tampers with the dry and sarcastic, which he finds more often than not reason to chuckle at than to take seriously.

"I meant that, you know," she says from time to time, and he waves a hand in the air, _yeah, sure you did. _Ty Lee usually giggles at these instances. Mai shoots her blades and daggers. The environment bleeds "friendly" more than it ever would if Azula were there, and though neither of them admits it, the calm that each of them feels because of her absence is undeniable.

"Azula stays," Ozai had said, that day in the throne room. Zuko had held his breath, afraid that she would burn him if he let it go. Not that the sickeningly elated grin in her eyes afterward wasn't enough. Azula always found some way to unsettle him, even in the rare instances that the air between them wasn't hard to breathe. Iroh had liked to joke that his brother's doting could do nothing but go to her head, but Zuko never thought it was far from the truth.

Ty Lee taps his shoulder again, a signal they established at the beginning of the trip that means _earth to Zuko, you're zoning out again_. He playfully slaps her hand away, and she flips in the air, rolling out three cartwheels onto the forest floor. Mai makes an "ooh" sound with as little life in it as possible, and the acrobat falls in a fit of giggles, taking her dark-haired friend down with her.

Zuko turns around to face them, trying to look exasperated as his gaze falls on their tangled spectacle. He presses a hand to his face, trying to hide the grin creeping its way up his lips as Mai lets out a shriek, Ty Lee's fingers wiggling under her arms. The side of his face without a scar is visible, and his eye glows golden in the sunlight as he smiles. He looks at the map, noting that they're about halfway there.

Past the shrieks and laughter, he yells, "Okay! That's enough.

Let's have lunch and make camp."

{...}

"Before you start pointing fingers, this isn't my fault." Toph saunters into their apartment with her hands held defensively in the air, plopping casually onto the couch at the far end of the room. Katara, right behind her, is positively fuming, hands clenched into hard fists as she resists the urge to punch the wall opposite her. Seething, she snaps back, "I'm well aware of whose fault it is, thanks."

"Mine, right?" Sokka appears on her left side, any signs of their argument last night having hidden themselves. He presses a hand to his temple, where blood from a fresh wound seeps past his fingers. The magistrate, it seems, is more capable of defending himself than either of them had originally thought. Though Sokka had managed to hold him down for at least two minutes during the raid, the chubby man somehow connected his fist with Sokka's forehead, instantly complicating things.

Suki, the last to filter into the room, comes up to the siblings with bandages and wet towels in her hand. Without asking to, she presses one of the towels to the blood flowing from Sokka's cut. Her face hangs low, hair casting a shadow on the different colors of paint smeared onto her skin. She hasn't spoken to any of the group but Sokka since the previous night, evidently hard hit by his sister's words. As the towel soaks up his blood, her palm takes on a gleaming and eerily pink color. Katara shivers.

"I'm not naming names," she says hoarsely, though the tension that crackles between them is enough to betray the truth in her words. Walking off, she touches a hand to her shoulder, flinching violently when pain flares up the length of her arm. As suspected, the joint is dislocated, wrenched partially out of place when a final guard tried to keep her from leaping out the magistrate's bedroom window. Katara sucks in her breath and continues to move forward, making for the bathroom.

Resting in the corner of the small, tiled room is a wooden bucket. Wincing, Katara fills it with water from her pouch, then fetches one of the towels that hangs inside the shower stall. Staring back at her from the mirror on the wall is a brown haired girl with red paint smeared across her cheeks, a bruised eye barely open under the weight of the lower lid, purple and swelling. Closing her eyes, Katara's dips the towel in the water and brings it to her face.

Suki appears in the doorway and walks silently past the threshold. After wetting a fresh towel in the bucket, she starts to wash her own face of its Kyoshi colors. Katara notices that, next to Toph, she is the least battered of the four of them, and this despite the fact that she happened to be standing in the same room when things began to spiral out of control. A single cut slices its way thinly across her midriff, though Katara can tell that the incision is far from deep.

"Hey."

She hates Suki for that.

"Hey. _You. Listen._"

Katara blinks her eyes and looks to her right, where Sokka leans against the doorjamb, a hand still held to the pink-stained towel. His heated gaze centers on her, and as she stubbornly keeps her own rooted to the mirror across from her, he spits out, "I'm not going on the next raid."

Katara flinches. Voice dangerously casual, she replies, "What do you mean?"

"I mean I know what you're thinking, Katara." He inserts himself in front of the mirror and faces her nose to nose, eyes narrowed to slits. When she doesn't look away, he continues, "You're thinking that the magistrate won't expect another attack because we got our asses handed to us. You're thinking we should recuperate and go back before the day is over, and the answer is _no._"

"Fine," she says evenly, brushing him off with her uninjured arm, "I'll just take Toph and Suki with me."

Sokka laughs. "Katara, I don't think you understand."

She's made it halfway to the door, but his interjection stops her. Her breath catches in her throat, and she presses a hand to the wall to steady herself.

"None of us are going."

_Stop. Stop stop stop. _

"Not me, not Suki, and not Toph."

_This can't be happening. Not now. Not at a time like this. _

"We're done, Katara. All of us."

She falls to the floor.

{...}

"There's no way the magistrate and his guards held their own against them. I don't believe it. _Azula _won't believe it." Zuko casts a doubtful glance at the handful of guards standing at the opposite corner of the magistrate's courtyard. They laugh good-heartedly and pat each other on the back, oblivious to the teenage trio. Zuko hears one of them say to the others, "That water tribe girl's gonna have a hard time popping her arm back into place"-he blinks his eyes and takes a moment to picture this-"I almost feel bad for her."

"If it was me, she wouldn't even have an arm at this point," breathes Mai loftily. Bored, she plays with her bangs and slyly adds, "I'm surprised they managed to make scars."

Ty Lee rolls her eyes and lightly punches Mai's arm. The acrobat hasn't said a word up until now, for once rendered deep in thought by the situation that surrounds them. Now that she's been jarred from her pondering, Zuko looks at her attentively and hopes that she has something better to add to their already lackluster conversation.

"Well, there has to be something else, right?" she starts. "Maybe one of them wasn't there?"

"Nope," interrupts Mai. "The guards said there were four."

"Chi blockers?"

Zuko shakes his head. "If it'd been that, we'd have heard about it by now." He jerks his head in the direction of the guards, and Ty Lee murmurs in agreement. Looking up to the sky, she scrutinizes the rain stricken clouds and poses a last possibility:

"What about an emotional break?"

"Emotional break?" Mai drawls. She looks at her friend skeptically, but Ty Lee continues unabated.

"Yeah. I mean, we all have our off-days, right? And things haven't exactly been working in their favor either. The Avatar's still unaccounted for, the Fire Nation controls over a third of the planet, Azula lives to terrorize the world another day. . ." Zuko and Mai look at her with slightly widened eyes, and she touches a hand to her mouth. "Oops," she murmurs, blushing.

They all laugh.

Moments later, Zuko clears his throat and says, "Even if that's the case, it doesn't tell us what we're supposed to do now. They could be anywhere in the city, and if we tried going on a manhunt, they'd disappear within hours."

"They don't know that we're here yet, do they?" asks Ty Lee.

Mai snorts. "The only reason they made a mess of the checkpoint is because they wanted us here. It was bait they knew we'd take." She turns to look at Zuko expectantly, to which he responds by frustratedly running a hand through his hair. _He has no idea what he's doing, does he? _she muses. A grin curls its way up her lips, but she covers it with her fingers.

"Let's get some rest. Think on it a bit." Ty Lee touches Zuko's shoulder and beams at him encouragingly. Darting her head in both directions, she leans in close and whispers, "Mai and I can do a little snooping in town, if that would make you feel better." Feigning a smile for her benefit, he gently cuffs her on the head and starts to walk off in the direction of the magistrate's designated boarding rooms. Mai steps away from the column she's been leaning against and looks after him pensively.

"Come on," she says, beckoning to Ty Lee with her hand. They follow Zuko for all of seven feet before making a sharp left at where the courtyard meets the back steps to the main building. Mai plunges into a vine-ridden tunnel that she remembers one guard saying leads to the city's back alleys. With calculated flicks of her wrist, she cuts the obtrusive growths away while Ty Lee chooses simply to push them to the side. The walk through the tunnel feels longer than it should be, but soon enough they're confronted with the dumpsters of a questionable bar, and the redolent scents of nature subside behind them.

As Mai makes her way to the front of the bar, Ty Lee asks in a quiet murmur, "I'm sorry, but what, exactly, are we doing?"

A pair of brawny, filthy men turns to stare at them as they make for the door. Mai pretends not to notice, directing her attention to the rusted door handles with masked distaste. Ty Lee still waits patiently for an answer, and as they step inside, Mai smiles with all the confidence of someone who means business.

"Hunting," she says loudly. "We're going hunting."


	3. Chapter 3

So. . . I haven't updated in, what, five months? Whoops. I kinda lost inspiration while writing this chapter back in April, and then it chose not to come back until sometime last week. But hopefully, that won't be the case with the chapters to come, because I'm not giving up! I'm going to finish this thing or at least get far enough into it to where I feel satisfied.

As always, read and review, please!

* * *

There is a hand pressed to Katara's forehead when she wakes up. She grabs it upon instinct, eyes flashing open in alarm when a cry rings out from her throat. Quick flashes of pain course through her arm as she attempts to withdraw her hand, and Katara grits her teeth. Toph, seated off to the side, sizes up the nail marks Katara dug into the skin of her wrist. To Katara's relief, they aren't injuriously deep, and her eyes come to rest on the damp rag in the girl's hands instead.

"You were running a fever," Toph explains.

Katara touches her fingers to the small beads of water that dot her burning forehead. As she props herself up on her right hand, she notices the way the cotton of her clothes sticks to her arms, her legs, her chest. "How long was I out?" she murmurs. The room blurs before her in a montage of shadowed colors. Katara closes her eyes.

"A good six hours." Toph re-drenches the rag in a bucket of water, then presses it gently to Katara's forehead. A trembling sigh escapes Katara's throat upon her nerves registering the cold. The difference in temperature is staggering, like ice to flame. It worries her more than anything.

Toph stands up from the tatami floor and starts to bustle about their room, putting things scattered earlier in the day back into place. Each outlaw's bloodied clothing comes under her fingers and adds to a rosy pink stain on the rings of her skin. She dumps all of the clothes into a wash bucket, but doesn't stay to watch the water color like Katara does. Toph's instinct is to shift her gaze from one item to another and compartmentalize it. She doesn't need-doesn't _want_-to feel the pain and the suffering. All she wants is to touch it and then throw it away before it cuts her too deep. All she wants is to stay strong, to stay whole.

And Katara, after two years in her company, cannot deny that she has.

"Sokka, he-" says the earthbender after a while, hands busy with fluffing the love seat pillows. Her voice comes out awkward and strained, a quiet murmur evolving into a sentence aching to finish. Katara waits patiently for Toph to add on, but all that can be heard is the muffled sound of her fist against each pillow. Outside, the summer breeze begins to take on a quicker velocity, pulling at the curtains with a low, insistent whine.

"He doesn't want to lose you."

Katara draws her head up sharply to look Toph in the eye. Though Toph struggles to compose herself and return the piercing gaze, Katara reads the expression mapped across her friend's face without effort. It is the very same expression that enveloped Suki's face the previous night, the very same expression that has kept Sokka within its grasp since their father died. Katara's blood starts to coarse insistently through her arteries and veins as she realizes with despair that she's lost her final ally.

"He-"

She violently lifts herself from the floor, wincing as she pushes off of her arm. The sheets that laid under her flutter wildly in her wake, but she does not wait for them to settle. Toph ducks down her head as she thunders by, fists clenched and brows pinched. "He's losing me now," Katara announces. No one but Toph can admit that her voice cracks.

The closet is littered with clothes that no one's bothered to organize, so Katara pulls randomly at shirts and pants. Half of what comes into her hands isn't even hers, but at this point she's too far gone to care. Katara takes as much as she sees fit, then storms back out into the living room, where Toph remains standing bewildered and still. There isn't much of anything that she can say now to quell her friend's anger; the way Katara is slamming things into a sack clearly tells her that.

"Our goals," says the waterbender forcefully, not looking Toph in the eye, "they're-they're different now. You guys are okay with just helping people. I'm not. I need to do more than that."

"You need to find the Avatar," Toph clarifies. Katara opens her mouth as if to protest, but upon a raised eyebrow from Toph, she purses her lips and goes back to packing her things. Toph's bending skills, she's learned over the years, aren't just good for sensing vibrations in the earth, but for sensing them in people, too. She doen't need eyes to see what's written on Katara's face; just a flick of her wrist and some seconds of concentration. And this on top of all the observations about Katara she's kept stashed in her brain since the two of them first met, the most prominent of them being Katara's desperation to find the one person she knows is truly capable of saving the world.

This is always where their arguments circle back to: The Avatar. Sokka takes the cynics' side, waxing rhetoric on how if their "savior" wasn't there then, they shouldn't expect to depend on him now. And Katara, as expected, fiercly excercises the opposing view point. ("We don't know that he chose not to help! We can't know! Not until we find him!") Toph has come to realize that, as angry and scarred as she is, Katara has the most hope in her left to spare. She believes in the Avatar's existence more than any of them.

Toph wonders if she isn't the only who feels guilty for not having more faith.

"Can I come with you?" she asks.

Katara grunts as she ties the end of her sack into a tight knot. She has enough clothes to last her two weeks, and finding food has never really been a problem for her. If she's feeling particularly desperate, she can always use the handful of yuan she has stored in her shirt. She touches her chest and listens closely, nodding in satisfaction when she hears the coins jangle. Toph stands silently off to the side, awaiting her answer.

The way that Katara looks straight into Toph's face sends chills down the earthbender's spine. Because it isn't necessary: the eye contact. Any way Katara faces her, the words will still be the same. Less in volume, perhaps, but for the most part unchanged. Why she needs to look a blind girl in the eye to tell her something is a scary thought, and one that Toph does not have the answer to.

"Sokka needs you more than I do."

It hits her like a slap in the face.

"What?" Toph whispers. She makes an effort to clench her fists, but instead her hands fall loosely at her sides. Katara offers her a sympathetic look. It's a lie, what she's just said. Sokka doesn't need Toph, or her for that matter. He and Suki are perfectly fine together. They can do without anyone else so long as they have each other. The bigger picture isn't in their immediate interests, and that works well for what the two of them have.

"The Earth Kingdom needs you," Katara says, comforted a little because she doesn't have to lie. She squares her jaw and pulls her lips in, looking straight ahead as she makes for the door. A quick glance to her left tells her that her brother and his girlfriend are perfectly unaware of her impending exit. Toph remains unmoving as Katara passes her, steel gray hair shielding half of her face from view. Katara hopes she isn't crying, although the chances of that at this point aren't high. She presses a hand to the doorjamb, looking back at the room once more before pulling her things to her body and walking away.

"Idiot," Toph mutters, attempting to stifle a sniffle. "I knew that already."

{...}

"I feel like we should've gotten more from that than we did."

Mai grunts indignantly in response. She and Ty Lee shuffle through the crowded streets of the city, making their way to a particularly dingy and forgotten sector of it. The thugs they came into contact with in the bar hadn't seemed too interested in dishing out any useful dirt on the outlaws, or, as Ty Lee had suggested shortly after, simply hadn't had the answers to the questions the girls were asking. The only solid piece of information they had actually managed to garner from the brutes was a general idea of the area the foursome has been seen wandering in, and even that covers at least a ten mile radius.

"So," Ty Lee continues, clearing her throat, "are we just banking on the chance that we'll see them?" The sun is long gone from the sky, replaced instead with a glaringly bright crescent moon that illuminates the city's organized chaos. The people who fill the streets at this time of day are those who find their business in curtained rooms and dark corners. Mai takes silent note of the passersby carrying weapons, watching for any sudden movements from her peripherals. She and Ty Lee are only moderately well known across certain parts of the Earth Kingdom, but they've done enough damage under Azula's lead to attract some sort of revenge. And besides, letting down her guard isn't something she would do anyways.

"Have any better ideas?" she replies, doing her best-which isn't very much-to not sound perturbed. Ty Lee spares her a lighthearted glance and a shrug, but Mai is hardly amused. She downturns her lips and continues to survey their surroundings, searching for anything that might give the outlaws away. Dark though it may be, the moonlight is full enough to give her a good idea of what the people around her look like. She can differentiate between skin tones, which is the main thing she's banking on, given that members of the Water Tribe generally have darker skin than most, emphasis on 'generally'.

Ty Lee reaches out to touch her shoulder. "It hasn't even been one day," she reasons. "You don't have to kill yourself."

"I know," Mai replies, curt. "I want to."

"Why?"

"Because."

"Because why?" She turns to give Ty Lee an annoyed look, but the brunette stares back at her just as forcefully, jaw set and brow pinched. The two of them have come to a standstill in the melee. Mai, leaning towards irritated now, sends Ty Lee her most chilling of glares, one where her eyes are narrowed into slits and her brows are so pinched together they look conjoined. She juts out her lip just a touch for an added effect, but Ty Lee seems to be taking none of it, staring stubbornly back. "Well?" she asks, one hand on Mai's shoulder, the other on her hip.

Mai almost caves and responds to the prying question, when a defining movement catches her eye from across the street. She gently lifts Ty Lee's hand from her shoulder, waving a hand behind her when her friend starts to protest. A single figure clad in midnight black moves slowly away from them and further into an almost unnoticeable alley. Mai follows the stranger with her eyes, paying particular attention to the way she holds her left arm at a specific and unchanging angle. If she squints her eyes, she thinks she can see bandages sticking out from under the sleeve, but she has to get closer to be certain.

"What?" Ty Lee inquires, following Mai's gaze. She stands on her tip-toes, trying to see above the crowd before someone pushes her back down. Mai grabs her wrist urgently and presses a gloved finger to her lips before listing her head in the alley's direction. Ty Lee barely catches a glimpse of the figure retreating into the shadows, but she's been in the business long enough to catch the things that matter. Her eyes go wide as she registers who exactly it is Mai is proposing to follow, and she looks back at her partner in absolute disbelief. The reality of it is almost too hard to register. "_No. Way._"

"Yes way. Now get moving, and be quiet." Mai pulls them both towards the alley, gritting her teeth to keep from yelling at all of the people in their way. It seems like forever that they're stuck in the middle of the jumbled streets, and when they finally make it out, she almost considers that they might have lost the waterbender. Only the smallest of rustles alerts her to Katara's remaining presence. Ty Lee puts on her serious face and gives an abrupt nod of understanding before they head into the darkness of the constricted alley. Their footsteps make close to no sound, as they've been trained to do, and within a matter of minutes, Mai latches her eyes onto the faint outline of Katara's seated figure. The waterbender appears to be exhausted, leaning over into her lap instead of pressing her head back to the wall, a position from which she'd be able to see them coming. Mai almost smiles.

Ty Lee, walking in back, does a quick survey of their surroundings. There's nothing in immediate range that she can use to jump onto the walls and gain a foothold, which means she'll have to rely solely on her hands and feet. She squints her eyes in the darkness, studying any cracks and crevices that she can manage to find. Katara isn't far from where they currently stand; a minute more at most, and she has to jump. Ty Lee gives the walls one more scrutinizing look over before squaring her shoulders and moving into a crouching stance.

The jump doesn't land her too far up the left wall, but she scales it with skillful agility, digging her fingers and toes into whatever crevices she can find between the bricks. Katara is less than twenty feet away from her, seated at the foot of the right wall, unaware of either her or Mai's presence. Ty Lee moves farther up the wall toward a window and latches her fingers onto the ledge, silently clambering up. If she can jump across to the window opposite this one and then downscale the right wall, all without so much as a stirring of the air, capturing Katara might actually be possible.

Mai, wordlessly moving closer to Katara along the alley floor, spares Ty Lee a quick glance. Neither of them has to say anything to understand what the other is thinking; they've been working together long enough for exchanges like this to be wordless and sufficient. Ty Lee returns the stare with a friendly salute before looking to her target: a window ledge that rests a solid five feet away. They're lucky to have even found Katara in the middle of hundreds. Finding her in an easily maneuvered alley makes Ty Lee feel all the more peachy about the situation. She makes the leap with practiced ease and lands her feet gracefully on the ledge.

Her peripherals tell her that Katara is still too deep in thought to have noticed her, so Ty Lee silently starts to downscale the wall, taking care to make sure that her footholds are perfectly secure. Her braid is thankfully pulled back into a bun, as is routine on covert operations. She eases herself down with painstakingly slow movements, positioning herself barely a few inches above Katara before tensing her muscles. Katara barely notices Ty Lee before she lands three good punches to her back and each arm. The waterbender lets out a frustrated snarl and attempts to wind up her arm for a punch, but instead it falls limply to her sides. "_No!_" she shrieks, uselessly flailing her body from side to side.

Mai materializes in front of the pair, armed to the teeth with kunai. As she uses her one free hand to turn Katara around and cuff her wrists, Ty Lee launches off of the wall and lands neatly on the ground. The acrobat looks to Mai and grins cheekily while dusting off her arms. "Bet you twenty gold that Zuko pees his pants," she says.

Mai rolls her eyes in exasperation, but the smallest of smiles does manage to grace her lips. She establishes a firm hold on Katara's hands before pushing her in the direction of the alley's end. The waterbender looks positively infuriated and tries hopelessly to struggle out of her bonds for a few minutes before giving in and ducking her head. Mai wants to say that the outlaw looks broken and defeated, but as soon as the thought crosses her mind, Katara breaks out into a cold, harsh laugh. Ty Lee feels the hairs on her arm prickle, and Mai, in spite of herself, senses a shivering chill run down her spine.

"Twenty?" Katara sneers. "Please. I bet you _one thousand_."

* * *

**Note:** I decided to be cruel and leave Zuko and Katara finally meeting each other for the next chapter. My apologies. ;)


End file.
